Hamilton

The screams rise up every evening at sunset, echoing and harmonizing off the blunt-fingered towers of Hamilton. Cedar submerges herself in them at first, then stops her ears with wax, then suffers through them, then ignores them. Days she loiters by the river, ducking back into the reeds when the children come down to the water, arms and legs frogskinned and scarred. Hidden, she listens to the rusty creak of their voices, words broken in half against shattered teeth, and wonders what they say. Hamilton speaks an interior tongue not shared with outsiders.

She trades burbots for a night’s rent, pulled gasping and fighting from the oily green ooze of the river, trades them still barbed on her hooks to her landlord. His fingers twitch and caress the metal, tease it out from their mouths. He throws the fish back to be caught, pierced, and ransomed another day.

She rises early, before the sun, to get to the river and away from the women who throng the streets at dawn, breaking their nails off bloody against streetlights, fenceposts, closed doors. They come into her room while she’s gone, men and women both, and burn themselves on her stove, stab themselves with her pens, bite hunks out of her soap. When she returns, dogged by the evening, they have set things to rights, the only testimony scars on the door and teethmarks deep in her soap.

Missionary Work

We have been mountains rising out of the seas, the true gods of Olympus: shaggy-bearded with clouds, potent with rain. Months beyond sight or hope of land, a smooth bowl of water and air and us, moving restlessly upon the surface of the water.

We were mustered out of the navy; driven out, say. Long work to bring us all together again, a life’s work and more, to gather us onto this portless argosy that flies no flags, claims no license. They have seen us coming, up from Olympus, riggings black with sailors in stolen uniforms, spars bare and daring above the white belly of our sales; seen us coming, turned tail, and ran. They fear contagion. We bear ideals like sickness, and they run too late: already we have wormed our way into some few willing eyes, bred a few impossible thoughts, shown a different way for those daring few.

A bloody war, fought among waves the size of office towers, tangled in spirals of plastic and perfume. Hours of mutual negotiation to bring us into conflict. The guns fire once an hour throughout the night, stars ill-regarded fallen to the sea but unresigned. Every death is a new member of our crew, come home at last.